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Through the Looking Glass With Ben Rhodes

Ben Rhodes in the White House Situation Room in March.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

My interest in Ben Rhodes began with a photograph I saw from Senator Barack Obama’s insurgent campaign for president in 2008. The photograph showed a group of Obama’s young speechwriters celebrating a victory. In the shallow background was a young writer, sitting at a table, with a dark, wool ski cap pulled down low, nearly over his eyes.

The young writer’s name, I learned, was Ben Rhodes. Following the practice I have pursued for the past 25 years, I created a new file on my laptop and labeled it “Rhodes.” Every decent journalist I know keeps dozens of files like that on subjects that interest them. We move them around on our screens and tuck them away into other files. Sometimes we deposit them in the trash. Every few months or so, I would scroll through the clips in the file to see if they added up to something larger that I wanted to write about. For several years, the answer was no. So it sat there.

My interest heightened during the debates over the Iran nuclear deal, which seemed to highlight the increasingly sophisticated use of digital tools by powerful interests — including the White House — to achieve their policy aims, a practice that both amazed and troubled me. The campaign to sell the deal, it seemed to me, had been constructed by someone very smart, someone with a real mastery of an art that I recognized immediately, because I had built my entire career on it and had also taught it for 10 years to graduate students at N.Y.U. and Columbia University: narrative. Through a cascade of tweets, quotes and other social-media posts, a story was being told, with the purpose of motivating people to feel a certain way, in order to achieve a specific foreign-policy aim. The other side was doing the exact same thing, of course, but they weren’t very good at it — and they weren’t in the White House. When I started asking some of my colleagues for the name of the master storyteller whose narratives I was watching unfold, only one name came back at me: Ben Rhodes.

So in my spare time, I began thinking harder about Rhodes and what he actually did, with the aim of writing a long magazine story about him.

After the dust-up over the Iran deal was safely over — I thought — I pitched my editors at The New York Times Magazine on a profile of Ben Rhodes. They agreed to it. I then asked Rhodes in December of last year if he would be willing to cooperate for the story. He almost immediately said yes. And that is where the story gets complicated — at least for the people who have written, blogged and tweeted about it over the past week.

Rhodes knew who I was. How do I know that? Because the White House is equipped with Google. And because Rhodes told me so himself. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at N.Y.U., where I taught, and he appreciates longform narrative journalism, which is what I do. He is a regular reader of the magazines — like Harper’s, The New Yorker and The Atlantic — in which I have published dozens of deeply reported stories over the past 20 years. We met a few times, and when I told him what I wanted to write, and why, he understood immediately why it was important and why I wanted to do it. He decided to help me. During the course of my reporting, he opened every door I asked him to open (except for one question I wanted to ask the president). He was always incredibly direct and candid with me. In more than a dozen hours of taped conversation, he went off the record, for very brief periods, only twice.

Rhodes wasn’t afraid of the fact that I strongly disagreed with him on specific matters of policy — like the war in Syria. He welcomed disagreement and encouraged it. He vociferously supported the president’s policies on every single issue we spoke about — and made some excellent points, some of which changed my mind about things that I thought I felt clearly about. It turned out that Rhodes had been instrumental in reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba and Myanmar. None of the diplomats he worked with seemed to have a single bad word to say about him.

When a White House adviser — not Rhodes — mentioned a “war room” for selling the Iran deal, a phrase that disturbed me, I went back to Rhodes and asked what it was and who ran it. He arranged for me to interview anyone I wanted. They were all candid and factual. They explained to me how they had used state-of-the-art tools and a sophisticated understanding of the way information moves in the social-media age to sell a deal that they clearly believed to be in the United States’ national interest.

But why were any of them talking to me? I soon surmised that Rhodes’s motivation in allowing me to peek behind the curtain came from a disquiet he felt at the possibility, or the likelihood, that the machinery he managed so brilliantly would soon be in the hands of his successors, who might use it to do things that he thought could be quite dangerous — like goading the United States into another pointless, bloody foreign war. Rhodes readily admitted to me that the work he does is a potentially dangerous distortion of democracy, but he also felt that it had become a necessary evil, caused by the fracturing of the 20th-century mass audience and the decline of the American press. He expressed a deep personal hopelessness about the possibility of open, rational public debate in a brutally partisan climate. But didn’t the country deserve better? I kept asking him. Over time, our conversations around this point evolved, without either of us directly mentioning it, into a kind of gentleman’s bet: My article would go as hard as I could at the truth as I saw it, The Times would publish it, and one of us would be proved right while the other would be proved wrong.

My article, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru,” was published online on May 5. It was 9,500 words long, with many more thousands of words about Cuba, Myanmar and other subjects left on the cutting-room floor. In the days since publication, seemingly several hundred articles — the number keeps going up — have been posted about the story, very few of which address any portion of the text itself. Many of them make exactly the same points, with tiny variations, in nearly identical language. These postings are intensely critical — of Ben Rhodes, of me, and of The New York Times Magazine. Meanwhile, the reception in other parts of the world and in The Times’s comments section, dealing with the text itself, has been quite interesting and has started a useful discussion on issues that I care about very deeply.

Before I address some of the criticisms of the article, I would like to state two very basic things for the record:

1. I stand behind every single word I wrote. This newspaper does, too. The New York Times has looked closely at every complaint leveled against the piece and has found absolutely nothing to correct. If anything is found to merit a correction, it will certainly be corrected.

2. I think Ben Rhodes is the bravest person I’ve ever met in Washington. If it sounds weird to say that Rhodes is both a manipulative spin-doctor and a deeply honest, creative person who believes strongly in the policies he spins for, well, that is still the truth.

The first is that I am an “ardent opponent of the Iran deal” and “neocon” who, by writing this article, was plotting to sow seeds of mistrust about a policy that I have long assailed. This hot take, which has been tweeted and retweeted by thousands of people, is a fever-dream caricature, one that willfully ignores and obliterates the many hundreds of thousands of words I have written during my 20 years as a reporter. The most important article I ever wrote, according to this take, was one for Slate in 2009 titled, “Why Israel Will Bomb Iran,” which — along with a YouTube clip of a panel that I was on last year at Hudson Institute — apparently demonstrates that I was a kind of wolf in sheep’s clothing whose true aim in writing a profile of Rhodes was to discredit the nuclear agreement with Iran.

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Let’s consider the Slate article first. It was, like a lot of Slate articles, intentionally provocative. It unfolds as an exercise in rational choice superpower-client state theory. It was designed to be provocative on the way to making a serious point.

Near the top of the article I state: “From a U.S. point of view, at least, there is little reason to doubt the analysis that a nuclear Iran with a few dozen bombs can be contained at relatively limited cost using the same strategies that successfully constrained an aggressive Soviet Empire armed with nearly 45,000 nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War.”

The rest of the article proceeds to explain exactly why, “from the standpoint of international relations theory, the scariest thing about recent Israeli rhetoric is that an attack on Iran lines up quite well with Israel’s rational interests as a superpower client.”

My analysis of how Israel might see its own rational self-interest was apparently shared by no less distinguished a neocon than President Obama. As Leon Panetta noted in my magazine article, perhaps his main job as secretary of defense was to restrain Israel from bombing Iran — by convincing them that America would do it for them, if Iran actually threatened to build a bomb.

The panel at the Hudson Institute was organized by Lee Smith, an ardent opponent of the Iran deal. Smith is definitely a right-winger, rabid even. He is also my friend, and he knows a ton about things beyond politics that I also care about, like the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and how to make the pivot at second base. And, believe it or not, Smith was also my friend back when we were neighbors in Brooklyn. He was the editor of the Village Voice Literary Supplement and an ardent admirer of Edward Said (sorry, Lee). I agreed to sit on his panel after he called me up to interview me about an article that I wrote in The New Yorker about a truck driver named John Coster-Mullen, who reverse-engineered the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I explained to Smith what I considered to be an important difference between nuclear know-how and infrastructure, one that I thought was being blurred by the rhetoric of both sides in the Iran deal debate. Thanks to Coster-Mullen, I told him, I had the plans for a nuclear bomb in my desk drawer at home — but I lacked the tens of billions of dollars necessary to proliferate. I thought that Smith’s article was fair to what I wrote, so I agreed to be on his panel.

“Unlike many of you, I’m a writer. I’m a journalist. I’m not involved in partisan politics. I’ve generally considered myself to be a liberal Democrat. These principles [of bipartisanship and consensus] historically are noncontroversial ones. They’ve been embraced by every American administration since World War II. To find them being undone in this very rapid way, given the potential consequences of unchecked nuclear proliferation — not just in the region but also in Asia — is and should be a terrifying thing for Americans to contemplate, whatever their feelings about this president or Republicans or Democrats. As someone who has reported in and around questions related to nuclear programs and gray market economies, I am startled by the lack of attention and clarity that is obvious in the way these stories are being reported.”

About an hour into the discussion, I suggested, in response to a question, that a nuclear deal with Iran — if it destroyed existing nonenrichment standards — might lead to widespread nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Another person who thought the same thing, it turned out, was Hillary Clinton, speaking to Fareed Zakaria the previous year. “I believe strongly that it’s really important for there to be so little enrichment or no enrichment at least for a long period of time because I do think any enrichment will trigger an arms race in the Middle East,” Clinton said. Maybe the things Clinton said on CNN in 2014 weren’t supposed to be true in Washington in 2015, but they were, and still are. For anyone who has thought much about nuclear weapons — which I have, having written long pieces on the subject for both Harper’s and The New Yorker — the prospect of dismantling nonproliferation safeguards and standards that have kept tens or hundreds of millions of people safe since Hiroshima and Nagasaki is terrifying.

So, do I support the Iran deal? On balance, I suppose I do. It’s a complicated agreement and I’m not an expert (I’m a journalist), but after talking to people who are experts — including Leon Panetta, who told me that he supports the deal with reservations — I imagine it’s probably a good-enough idea that I should have some reservations about, too.. I will wait and watch and see what happens, just like everyone else.

Finally, I would like to turn to the protestations of two journalists, Jeffrey Goldberg and Laura Rozen, who felt wounded by a very brief passage in my article, in which they were named as people who “helped retail” the administration’s talking points.

The reason I chose to cite Rozen and Goldberg as important conduits for the administration’s foreign policy message is based on two kinds of evidence. One: This very idea was suggested to me in taped interviews with White House staff members who dealt with these journalists; in interviews with other journalists; and in interviews with other people who read their work. Two: My own reading of both Rozen and Goldberg for years had suggested to me that this was a fair thing to say about their work. It seemed at least worth mentioning the names of some journalists in a 9,500-word article about a writer who tells stories to the public, using journalists as one of his instruments. If I didn’t name any of those journalists, readers might fairly conclude that Rhodes was in fact terrible at his job — or that journalists, especially those who live in Washington, belong to a special category of person who must never be criticized, even gently.

And this is why, I think, my story ignited such a firestorm. It was a portrait of an honest, dedicated person with a great deal of power in Washington who happens to be deeply critical of the press — not out of cynicism or anger, but out of regret over the seemingly vanishing possibilities of free and open discourse. I did not pry this critique out of Rhodes, nor did I introduce him to it. He has far more familiarity with the 21st-century news cycle than I do. It has been fascinating for me to watch my story, which was largely read on its own terms outside of Washington and even by the White House itself, go through the looking glass of social media. The story itself has vanished, replaced by a digital mash-up of slurs and invective, supported by stray phrases that have been mechanically tweezered from different texts. The issues that Rhodes raises in my profile — about the reshaping of the media, the way American foreign policy has shifted, the way the world works now — none of these things are being discussed, either. Somehow, for a small group of people with very loud megaphones, the point right now seems to be me — or rather, a digital piñata they have slapped my name on. It seems fair to say that Rhodes won our bet.

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